


A Long Way From the Playground

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: To All the Boys I've Loved Before Series - Jenny Han, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Future Fic, Married Life, Peter's POV, Prompt Fill, Short & Sweet, literally just a day in the life, we love a supportive relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-16 05:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17543147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: Lara Jean's favorite spoon has been missing for over six hours. She is not impressed by that fact. Peter is making a 48 hour countdown on the dry erase board they keep tacked to the side of the fridge. She's only slightly more impressed by that joke.requested by anonymous: covinsky married





	A Long Way From the Playground

**Author's Note:**

> title from 18 by one direction no we're not gonna mention tht

Lara Jean Song-Covey has been awake since five forty-two a.m. 

She has lived in her new, adult house for three weeks and four days. She has been married, however, for only two and one respectively.

The shock has not worn off yet, and she doesn't think it ever will.

-

Peter has been Peter K. Song-Covey for…about two weeks, if he did the math right. And if he actually knows what day it is (he is not confident that he actually knows what day it is.) He has lived in his new, adult house for one day less than his wife because work sucks, but he has undoubtedly slept more hours in it than her.

The shock has not worn off yet, and he hopes it never does.

-

Peter stumbles into the kitchen sometime after eleven, rubbing at his eyes hard enough that he's probably left permanent fingerprints behind. His sweatpants are slung low on his hips, but the sweatshirt emblazoned with his wife's alma mater's logo compensates enough to keep him from being too scantily clad.

Lara Jean looks up from where she's forearm deep in one of the many boxes still scattered around the house and asks, "Have you seen my spoon?"

He grins and lets a soft, "Good morning to you, too, honey," mumble through sly, tired lips before he ever makes it over to the Keurig. (They're adults now, they have a Keurig.)

"I put your cup in when I heard you beating around in the bathroom looking for the toothpaste," she adds when she notices him frowning slightly down at his mug of already made hot chocolate. (Just because he's an adult doesn't mean he has to drink coffee.)

Mug in hand, he steps over to her and presses a kiss into her loose hair, murmuring a thank you before he pulls the mug to his mouth. He can feel her smile without even seeing her face.

He slips an arm around her waist and holds her there as she hums pleasantly under her breath, his cheek pressed against the crown of her head.

"Wasn't the spoon in the kitchen necessity box? With the egg timer and the coffee mugs?" he asks a few moments later after mentally backtracking his way through the frantic packing they'd done the moment they'd closed on the house.

"That's what I thought," she replies, leaning back into him. "But I've checked it twice."

"Mid-level kitchen necessities box?"

"I've been up since before six, let's assume I've checked all the kitchen boxes."

"And you couldn't unpack them while you were at it?" he teases, relishing as her laugh travels up through his ribcage, drums up every bone and muscle like fingers on chainlink. 

Innocently, she asks, "But then what would you do?" as she arranges two decorative hot plates next to the gas range embedded in the island.

He can't help but press another kiss to the top of her head. "Okay, operation spoon recovery is a go. Maybe it got put in a dining room box?"

She mumbles something that has her voice breathy and awed, but he can't hear it over the blitzing sound of the egg timer. He shoots a look out of the corner of his eyes at the oven, worried that maybe their realtor lied and the house was haunted after all - _the price is way too good for the neighborhood, LJ, we're gonna end up subletting the basement to a cult or something_ \- but she just slides from his grip and pads over to the appliance.

"Meal prep," she calls over her shoulder before he can even ask. "I wanted to try that recipe thingy I saw on Instagram- the one where they make all the different muffins from the same batch of batter?"

She drops the muffin pan on another hot plate - they really have too many - and looks down at them a little smugly, hands dropping to her hip. "I've still got it," she informs him, notching her chin over her shoulder.

"You never lost it," he replies with a lopsided smile.

She rolls the muffins on their sides with a toothpick and a look of determination before leaving them like that to cool, all at attention. He'd asked once what that was about, and she'd told him it had to do with aeration, etc., and for a moment he'd been worried he'd stumbled into some kind of science thing he was in no way prepared for. Now his eyes barely registered the gesture, knowing the motions like the back of his hand.

"So," she begins as she slides another pan full with batter onto the oven rack and bumps the door back shut. "I'm going to go check the dining room boxes, can you check the miscellaneous?"

He drains his mug in three long gulps that leave him hissing for breath - not as cool as he'd thought it would look - which means he ends up giving her a weak thumbs up and wheezing out, "Blue or red?"

The corner of her lips ticks up as she tries not to laugh, which leaves her reply of, "Blue," a little belated and more strained than it should be. As she passes by him to head toward the dining room, she snags the hem of his sweatshirt in between her fingers and tugs him into a kiss that only lands on half of their respective mouths.

Still, by the time she's made her way out of the room, his palm is flat on the tasteful granite of their island, and he's smiling at her like he used to all those years ago.

\---

Lara Jean's favorite spoon has been missing for over six hours. She is not impressed by that fact. Peter is making a 48 hour countdown on the dry erase board they keep tacked to the side of the fridge. She's only slightly more impressed by that joke.

\---

 _Who is that?_ Peter mouths to Lara Jean as she listens to whoever is on the other end of the phone call. She purses her lips, raising one eyebrow as she replies, _Who do you think?_

He grins. "Kit! Kit- hey, Kit!" 

"Sh," Lara Jean hisses, but there's no bite. Besides, Kitty is already hollering back through the phone to Peter excitedly, and Lara Jean's rolling her eyes, and finally she hands him the phone and takes off toward the living room, instructing him to simply see if Kitty remembers packing her spoon.

By the time he gets off the phone forty-five minutes later, he is no more wiser about the current resting place of Lara Jean's prized utensil, but he is in the loop about all the college drama Kitty continuously manages to sit on the fringes of and observe, so that has to count for something.

"Did she know where it was?" Lars Jean calls, seemingly able to tell he's done with the call.

He doesn't respond until they're face to face - or, eyes gazing over a harried form hunched over a water-damaged cardboard box halfway full of cables that need to go in the custom, "rustic" built-ins just below the TV.

"No," he finally replies, face and mouth and voice subdued as he scratches at the back of his neck. "Did you check your lunchbox?"

She expels an agitated breath, pushing swaths of hair back from her eyes where they're starting to unravel from the loose braid she has it in. "Not there either."

He can hear the fall in her voice, a slight taper at the end that is starting to derail toward what will soon be frustrated tears. He hates it, hates that she is even anywhere near that right now. She'd been so excited when their credit was finally good enough for them to be able to look at actually nice homes, and he had wanted her to feel like that for as long as possible.

If he didn't think he needed to find the spoon before, he knew it for certain now, and he'd already known it pretty clearly. That spoon was the final remaining piece from the set her grandparents had gifted her parents for their wedding. That spoon was an heirloom. She treasured it, and he treasured Lara Jean.

"Hey," he says softly as she stands back up. "We'll find it - promise."

She smiles at him, that kinda half thing that pushes one round cheek up and leaves the other one twitching like it's waiting for the sound of a pistol that has already been shot to start the race. It's a smile that wants to believe him and can't believe him, all in one. She has been giving him that smile since day one, and he knows that best response is to kiss the corner of it and get back to work.

"I love you," he tacks onto the kiss, just because he can, and she brushes her thumb over the stubble on his jaw as she replies in kind.

-

Peter likes his hair. He's found a good length for it, one that's long enough that it curls at the ends, but not so much so that it falls in his face. And the cut - it can be fixed up or, more often than not, can be an unaffected bedhead that puts every carefully concocted style to shame. All around, it's good hair.

Still, he has never wanted to pull it directly from his scalp as much as he wants to now.

Their house is two stories, reminiscent of both their childhood homes but not so close that they should talk to a therapist about it. The lawn is probably a quarter inch too long for the more attentive people in their HOA, but they have good neighbors who don't make a fuss about it. They have a decent sized basement, a cubby-hole attic, and a couple spare rooms they're ecstatic to one day fill.

All that being said, he has paced every stair, taken every possible step in the house. There wasn't a piece of flooring his feet hadn't touched, nor was there a single door knob his hands hadn't brushed over. He thought it would take a couple months to get fully acclimated, but he thought that maybe he knew every nail and screw of the house by the time he came back to the kitchen an hour and a half later.

"Okay."

Lara Jean looks over from where she's shuffling the few things they have around in cabinets - he really needs to go grocery shopping - and quirks a curious brow. 

"Babe, something's afoot," he adds as he tugs the fridge open with a finger and nabs last night's leftovers nimbly.

"Afoot?" she repeats with an incredulous laugh.

"For one, I might've just made eye contact with an opossum in the attic."

"I'll find an exterminator."

"Two," he starts, turning to the silverware drawer to grab a fork. "I've searched this place top to bottom."

"No spoon?"

"No spoon," he agrees, tapping the drawer shut with his hip before leaning against the counter.

He doesn't quite make it to popping the lid off the Tupperware container in his hand before his face bunches up like a skirt in the hands of an 16th century princess. Pushing lightly off the countertop, he Vs two fingers on his free hand around the knob on the drawer and slips it back open.

Sitting neatly atop the stack on the far left of the drawer is a spoon - the handle thicker than the rest, with a finely engraved floral pattern to boot. It is decidedly not a part of the nice, albeit helplessly plain, set that they registered for at Target.

"Hey," he calls, each letter ticking farther upward than the last. "Come here a sec."

He can hear her push off the island, the little rubbery bits on the bottom of her socks that are supposed to keep her from slipping tugging at the tile beneath them. She sidles up beside him, her shoulders pinching steadily inward, her lips doing much the same until they're completely rounded off.

"Did you forget to check the silverware drawer?" he asks, trying to keep that humorous accusation and the indebted laughter and the everything else from his voice. She shakes her head no, but her eyes are screaming yes at him louder than any sound he's ever heard.

It is, in the end, what breaks him.

In an instant he drops his container and fork onto the counter and slipps his arms around her from the side. Tugging her close until her shoulder bumps just over his heart, he bends over it to press a kiss through the long, silky sleeve of her pajama shirt.

"I love you so much, Covey" he says simply, adoringly, bumping his nose against the sensitive skin of her neck. She laughs, a soft, husky thing that makes him pull her even closer until she wraps her arms around him too and they're stood side to chest, holding one another in the way only they can.

"I love you, too, Covey."

He smiles, soft and genuine, leagues deeper in love than he had been when they were kids, even if that had always felt like an oxymoron. Surely he could never love her more than he already did, and yet every morning he got to wake up knowing they were together, he somehow figured out how.

Through the speed bumps, the years seperated by college, the long nights as she slogged through one degree and then another and he did his best to keep them both upright and all right. The years of decisions, one after the other, standing by her side. Through the first career, ill-fitting and soul-crushing, to the newest, a sacred and amazing opportunity. 

Through every single thing he loved her more and more, but never any less, without even a sliver of a doubt.

And now they are here, freshly married, in their kitchen, in their home, with memories to be made and lives to get on with and all these years stretched out before them. It feels like an impossible day, an impossible moment when she leans her head against his chest even if she's done it a thousand times before.

Because that's the thing. Everything feels like the very first time with her - every kiss and look and smile and utterance. They never feel stale, never feel as if they're worn out or routine.

He knows they never will, and that's fine by him.

\---

"Hey."

"Hm?"

"What'd you say earlier?"

"I've said a lot of things today, Peter. Most of them expletives when I realize we might have been a little _too_ organized."

A pause, two laughs. "No, earlier before you took the muffins out of the oven, you said something, but I didn't hear it."

"Nothing. It's stupid."

"Lara _Jean_."

"We have a dining room."

"And a kitchen."

"And a living room."

"A home office."

"A guest bedroom."

"A master bedroom."

"Peter, we have a house."

A hand over a hand, a smile, then another, a kiss to a forehead and then, "I'm still not going to unpack all those boxes by myself."

A sigh. "We should've just bought the pizza and beer and let Chris and Lucas loose."

"Probably."

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @wlwshehulk where you can send me prompts and i'll write abt missing spoons (or yknow, whtever applies fksjd)


End file.
